Octave number for middle C not standardized?
Captain's Log: Stardate 77705.6
Well, surprisingly I was right about it being easy to implement MIDI note-triggered envelopes for modulation. All the parts had already been built for other purposes, and I spent the day just wiring everything up and adding them to the GUI. They're already fully working with golden tests and copmletely usable through the GUI. The only thing that remains is to give them a different 3D model so that you can tell them apart visually from other kinds of modulators, which I'll probably finish up tomorrow.
As a slight side-track, while I was testing this all out, I had Anukari running as a plugin in Ableton. And I was creating a simple MIDI track when I noticed that Anukari and Ableton disagreed on which octave of C I was using -- Ableton said it was C3 but Anukari said it was C4. This was super confusing, because I was so confident that the note I had pressed was middle C, but I'll always believe Ableton over Anukari.
After doing a bit of research, I found that the octave number for middle C is not well-standardized, and different DAWs and VST plugins (and physical synths) variously name it as C3, C4, and even C5. To me it's ridiculously obvious that it should be C4, but evidently Yamaha named it C3 in the 80's and other companies went with that. The use of C5 actually makes some sense, as it makes the lowest C in MIDI C-0 instead of having to resort to negative octaves like C-2.
But anyways, C3 seems to be the most common so I changed Anukari to use that. Apparently Reaper lets the user change it, so if people complain at some point I can always make it configurable in Anukari as well.